Autism and Aggressive Behavior

Autism is a category of disability that is often associated with aggressive behaviors.  In working with individuals with autism, my experience has been that while most students with autism do not display aggressive behavior in school settings, there is a subset of students who will exhibit aggressive behaviors at some point in their school careers.  This is usually early in their school experience, but may occur at any time at any time.

From a behaviorist standpoint, aggressive behavior (like all behavior) can be considered communicative in nature.  The aggressive behavior communicates an unmet need when the student cannot communicate the need in a more pro-social manner.  For example, a nonverbal student with autism may become aggressive because the task he is asked to do is non-preferred and he is unable to communicate that he does not want to do it in another manner that results in him discontinuing the task.  In this situation the student has a need (i.e. to escape the task at hand) and a behavior (i.e. aggression) that is reinforced when the underlying need is met (i.e. when the aggression is sufficient that the student is allowed to discontinue the task.  When intervening with a problem behavior such as this, a replacement method of communication of the student's need would be identified, taught, and reinforced.  The problem behavior (aggression) would concurrently be placed on extinction (i.e. reinforcement is withheld) by attempting to limit it's ability to successfully result in escape from the the task.  Common extinction strategies include planned ignoring, although this strategy may be difficult to apply with aggression due to safety concerns of the student, peers, and staff.  The overall strategy is to find method of communicating the need that is pro-social and effective and then reinforce its use until it replaces the problem behavior because it is more effective for the student.  Problem behaviors are then put on extinction to make them less effective while the pro-social (replacement) behavior is made more effective through reinforcement.

Students with autism often have a number of characteristics that place them at greater risk for adopting aggressive behaviors as a means of communicating one's needs.  This is because individuals with autism have communication deficits and may have limited ability to make their needs know to others.  They also have a predisposition toward sensitive nervous systems that may be impacted by a variety of factors in the environment (e.g. lighting, temperature, tactile sensations related to clothing/furniture/materials, etc.)  These factors can lead to discomfort that may be difficult for the student to communicate to others.  Because of social-interaction deficits, individuals with autism may have difficulty understanding the impact of aggression on others or interpreting social situations and individual behaviors in terms of the level of threat.  Also, individuals with autism may not fully the perspective of others (* see previous blog on autism, section on Theory of Mind).

Aggression can be a learned behavioral response as well and some students with autism learn aggressive behaviors from peers or from educators or caregivers who have acted aggressively toward the student.  Individuals with autism are at a higher risk for being mistreated by educators and/or caregivers due to communication deficits, repetitive stereotyped behaviors that can impact the behavior of others (e.g. repetitive hand flapping that becomes highly distracting to other students in a classroom), and social-interaction deficits.  Once aggression has been modeled as an effective means of fulfilling a need, the student with autism may add it to his behavioral repretoir.